MarinerTek IT Solutions 
Original Landscape
Voss Industries is a manufacturer of specialized band clamps, V-band couplings, flanges, ducting components and a variety of other fabricated products for all industries. Their environment included a single PowerEdge 2950 Dell server running the 32-bit version Windows 2008 Standard as a file server and domain controller. Issues to address included increased scalability, performance issues and migration to a 64-bit operating system to improve resource utilization.
Project Designed and Deployed by Evan M. Kepner
MarinerTek Solution Design
The solution presented by MarinerTek IT Solutions leveraged VMWare virtualization technology to allow for a seamless transfer from the 32-bit to 64-bit environment. The process involved adding an additional PowerEdge server to use an initial host, virtualizing the current 2008 operating system, and then performing the transfer from 32-bit to 64-bit within the virtual environment. After a stability phase the current PowerEdge 2950 was added to the virtual environment.
Everything was managed with the greatest amount of care. All issues that arose were addressed and all changes were as transparent as possible to the users. They didn’t even notice any major changes.
Equipment
An additional PowerEdge R710 Server configured with X5650 6-core HT processors and 24 GB of RAM combined with VMWare vSphere Essentials was used to complete this solution.
Solution Results and ROI
The solution provided the following advantages to Voss Industries:
Converted to a 64-bit system
Voss now has a 64-bit virtual server in production rather than a 32-bit system. This was done in a way completely transparent to the users without production downtime.
Increased current hardware ROI
Voss’ original 32-bit environment was limited to 4 GB of RAM. By moving the VMWare the full potential of the existing PowerEdge 2950 could be realized. This allows for 1600% increase in total usable memory capacity. Additionally the server’s CPUs were underutilized, the virtual architecture allows for dynamically allocating processing units – at one virtual machine per core this would be 8 virtual machines, and 800% increase in operating system capacity.
The solution exceeds my expectations in that it will provide us with a great amount of expandability in the future as our system and user’s needs grow.
Created a fully fault-tolerant environment
Voss now has complete redundancy in their production system. Estimated recovery time in the event of a server hardware failure is a few minutes.
Allocated dynamic resource control
Voss now has a true private data-center. Resource pools can be configured within the virtual environment each with unique permissions. The Voss development team can now deploy multiple virtual machines for testing without impacting the production environment.
Increased business agility
Voss now has the ability to deploy multiple systems within their existing datacenter infrastructure. They also have the licensing to continue grow in hardware capacity as the business expands.
I would definitely be willing to recommend the engineers to other companies. MarinerTek IT Solutions engineers were much easier to work with than others I have dealt with, in that they were not afraid to stop a project and preform proof-of- concept work to make sure everything would go as smooth as possible. And if we had questions they were not hesitant to give us answers that would help us do some work on our own in the future.
